What is a Pageview? – RUGA Part 3

Start simple right? And what is more simple than a pageview? Wait… what exactly is a pageview?

This is something that’s been daunting me for a while. Pageviews are unlike a lot of stuff in Analytics in that they aren’t counted in cookies, nor really in the utm.gif. A pageview is defined by the loading of a page but we all know that it’s not REALLY that. Nothing in analytics is ever REALLY what it seems to be.

Quick refresher: how does GA get your data?

The page load activates the tracking code…

…tracking code writes to the browser cookies…

…the browser cookies provide data for the utm.gif query…

…and the utm.gif query is recorded by Google.

Actually, it ends up there’s slightly more to it than that.

Google doesn’t know when a page loads. They know when _trackpageview() [eg. _trackPageview(‘/product334a/learn-more’)] sends a query to their system. From that they can extrapolate that a page was loaded. Then, each time the this code is executed, it creates a time stamp on Google’s servers. Simple right?

You wish.

So a page was loaded. Which page? What was it’s title? Where were they coming from? What host served it? A pageview itself is meaningless without other data and that’s where the very concept of a “pageview” gets confusing.

So let’s say Google knows that the tracking code was called, how can they determine a particular pageview?

utmr – This is the URL of the referring page (populated only by the landing page)

utmp – This is the page request

And there is actually one more hidden in here:

utmt – this is the type of request being made. Normally this would designate an event, transaction, item or custom variable. However, in the case of a pageview this field just doesnt appear – pageview is the default type of gif request.